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Ben Ratliff, "Run the Song: Writing About Running About Listening" (Graywolf Press, 2025)
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- [00:00]
A
Hello, everybody. This is Marshall Po. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network. And if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, we at the NBM have started a service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast, and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts, and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that, fill out the form, and we can talk. Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [01:07]
B
I'm Chris Holmes and this is Burned by Books. Here you'll find interviews with writers you already love, like Jennifer Egan and Rebecca Mackay, mixed in with up and coming voices like Alexandra Kleeman and Roman Alam. You'll find us wherever you listen to podcasts, but check out previous episodes@burnedbybooks.com and on Instagram and Twitter earnedbybooks. Let's start the show. Ben Ratliff already had a committed practice of running through New York City while listening to music. But when the pandemic began, his relationship between those two experiences of the body came to a pivot point. What is the relationship between a body in motion and the movements of music and sound? And can the two be a catalyst to new kinds of listening and being in one's corporal form? These questions undergird Ben's quest in his book Run the Song to understand what running was already telling him about music and the event of listening. The result is a book about how a time of deep and pervasive isolation gave birth to a new kind of relationship between a longtime music critic and his vast catalog of songs that would accompany him on a run. Ben sets his critical language loose on a breadth of genres and styles that is daunting for an everyday listener. But his impetus is not mastery, but rather a search for the ongoingness of human experience and how music might connect us to others in their own current experience of this life. By asking questions of his own perceived tastes and inclinations, Ben produces a reading of artists and their music that shares with running an invitation to experience without preconceived outcomes. Run the Song is beautifully made and propulsive in its inquiry, in ways that feel like the tempo and pacing of various kinds of running. It is an utterly unique experience as a reader, and it just may have you rethinking how you listen and whether or not it might be a powerful act of a body in motion. Ben Ratliff is the author of Every Song Ever and Coltrane the Story of a Sound, which was a finalist for the National Book Critic Circle Award. Run the Song was recently long listed for the National Book Award and the Pen Diamondstein Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay. A former music critic for the New York Times, he lives in New York City and teaches at nyu. Welcome to Burned by Books, Ben Ratliff Thanks, Chris. I would love for you to start us off by just giving a sense of the feel and the pacing and the vibe of this work, and I wonder if you'd just read from the.
- [04:10]
C
Opening for us out quickly and on the move. Lock the door, down the steps to the mailboxes, the front door, a courtyard, the sidewalk, the street, a crossing amid cars and buses down the hill. The clearest and most seductive entrance to Van Cortlandt park in the Northwest Bronx is on Broadway between 242nd street and 252nd street, the parade ground, the park's open mouth. Here is a flat green field a mile and a half around, big enough for five or six sports events to be played on it at once. Soccer, baseball, cricket in the center, cross country running on the edges and outward into the veins of the adjacent woodlands. The volume of open sky and the uninterrupted sound of trees and birds above and ice, dirt and grass underfoot are vast by New York standards. A look across the field affords a range otherwise withheld from you in city life. You are measuring a space of which you can roughly see the outlines, and it is possible to listen toward what you hear, what you cannot quite hear, the sounds you imagine or recall, and sounds that have not yet been sounded. The air is relatively clear and relatively sweet to breathe. Light air, sound space As I look across the field from one edge to the other, I might also make this proposition if I know a song of a sort of middle length that stays truly on, one worth memorizing and one that coheres. I can imagine going through all of it in my head, from beginning to end, while running one circuit of the field. Maybe one of Jimi Hendrix's performances of Machine Gun from the Fillmore east on the day that 1969 turned into 1970. Maybe the fourth part of Beethoven's string quartet number 14, the long Andante man, non truppo in molto cantabile section. This would take practice. Maybe Betty Carter's live version of what a Little moonlight can do from 1982. Or if I develop really good pattern recognizing and signpost detecting. Bhavayami, recorded in 1963 by the Carnatic singer Mississippi Sabulakshmi. A devotional song glossing the entire story of the Ramayana Epic. All those songs, if we can call them songs, are not really long, but long enough for my purpose. They don't slip past you before getting started. They have a significant body. They are long enough to take you somewhere and hover and move onward and show you something.
- [06:53]
B
Thank you so much. One of the things about this book is that it is. It is just dense. Not in a way that we encounter when we read something that we find stiltifying, but dense in the sense of. There's a lot of ideas just impacted into your prose here, and one of them is about thinking about the body of a song. And here it is. You're thinking about a kind of, like, completeness of a. Of a song's body and wanting to put that in a parallel to the completeness of a track or a circuit of running. Can you talk a little bit about how you think about songs as something that can be completed and how that kind of connects you to an understanding of the body and motion?
- [07:42]
C
Sure. I think about. Okay, well, so I'm a listener just like everybody else, and I. And I have a pretty high opinion of most people as listeners. I think it's something that most of us are pretty good at. But my own training as a. As a listener really happened most significantly when I was writing for the New York Times, you know, sort of crunching music almost every day, writing reviews and writing about it in all sorts of ways. And, and one of the things I did most often was write about concerts. Concert reviews. These days, concert reviews are almost extinct.
- [08:28]
B
Yeah, I was trying to think the last time I read one.
- [08:33]
C
You're. You're not wrong. They really have gone away. But I was there just sort of for the tail end of the era of, you know, Concert reviews and newspapers. And it was understood within the, within the remit of the times that that concert reviews were important because they were cultural news. Something happened in a certain place. And this. And this was important. The culture not just of the city, because it was a city paper, but also maybe the culture of the world. And so I was out listening to music, you know, three or four nights a week, and often writing reviews based on what I saw and heard. And so what that did for me, I think, was to think about music less as a bunch of kind of bounded, saleable entities, you know, like copyrighted entities where, like the beginning and the end is really the most important things of, of. Of a song that's for sale and, and of course, a recognizable melody and stuff like that. But more and more, the more that I could think of music as an ongoing event, the happier I was and the easier it is and the easier it was to write about. And also, often with, with improvised music particularly, I was listening to music that didn't. Whose. Whose shape could be really unclear. Even, even when you were well into it, even when you were nearly at the end of it, you could be wondering, like, how's this going to come out? What is the shape of this thing? And at a certain point you just have to let go and recognize the fact that you are in the middle of the song. And maybe the beginning and the end aren't all that important. And so, you know, I spent years thinking about the fact that it's the middle that's important. It's the middle that's worth writing about. And, you know, what happens in the middle are, you know, it's. It's very hard to write about music in a way that's not just like, you know, play by play. But of course that's very boring. So you think about that. You, you think about certain things that happened that caught your ear and form sort of sense memories. And, you know, that's the, that's usually the beginning of your, of your writing. But anyway, just to get back to the idea that it's the middle of the song that really interests me the most. And I realized once I got into this practice of running while listening to music that I could access that middle quite easily through my own motion, through an atmosphere. And really what I wanted to do was to, to get, to get right to the marrow of the music, which for me is motion. I mean, yeah, sure, music is, you know, formally music is melody and harmony and rhythm and various ways to, to. To compose things according to certain patterns. And conventions and Is it a 32 bar song? Is it, is it, you know, sonata form, whatever. But basically for me, I'm interested in music as a quality of motion. You know, how does. And I found that running with music, my own, my own motion through an atmosphere could sort of not just mirror but even amplify for me the motion that was in the music. It made it. It made it easier and more exciting to write about in this way.
- [12:12]
B
So you, this project really comes out of COVID and it's attending isolations where your, your runs become. You're communing with, with the city in a way that perhaps they were before, but they're, they're given an extraordinary amount of weight and that gives you this sort of impetus to. To rethink how those pieces and songs and artists that you choose to listen to for that period of time out in the world are. Are chosen and selected. What was it about this sort of like longing to be out of isolation, to have a different experience with your city that kind of brought about or was a catalyst to that kind of new thinking about the music?
- [13:00]
C
Well, yeah, there was a time there when, you know, you felt very restricted in what you could do and. But as long as I could find a fairly open space and put something over my mouth, I felt that I wasn't doing any harm. And you know, the opposite of all the kind of closed in feeling that we have is the feeling of flinging yourself at the world that is involved in running. And so, oh, I mean, it was something to do. It was an obsession to burrow into just like any other kind of thing that one did during COVID But it was, it felt like, was coping and it was engaging myself in, in the, with the world in a way that I needed to do right then and also with my, with my city. As I started writing this book, I realized, well, so, you know, at first it's about listening and running and getting close to the insides of the music. But then the, the. The more I wrote, the more that the book turned into a book about attention, but also about place and how to really understand a place by, by finding routes through it and by. Especially in New York where there are all these kind of like imposed divisions on the place by roads you can. I found that I could kind of like stitch the city back together, you know, after what people like Robert Moses had done to it. I live a little part of the Bronx that. I live in. A part of the Bronx that is. That is separated from its neighboring parts by, by highways that are real impositions.
- [14:53]
B
But Moses style impediments to community.
- [14:57]
C
Oh, yeah, Community destroyers. Land destroyers. But as a runner, I found myself in this sort of having this sort of feeling that I could, like, reintegrate the Bronx by running.
- [15:11]
B
Amazing.
- [15:12]
C
Yeah. I mean, you. You start from point A and you go to point B, and somehow point A and point B become knitted together. It's that simple. Yeah.
- [15:25]
B
I mean, two. There are two things that really drew me to you as a. As a narrator of this experience, and one is music related and the other is running related. And I have a deep and historical relationship to both of these things, but I found myself rethinking their meaningfulness to my life in. In reading your work. And I'll start with your relationship to music, at least when it comes to running. And that is what I read as pure eclecticism. You don't, for example, think about beats for minute per minute for a song and how it might match a proposed pace. Instead, you think about an experience you might have over the course of a period of time that you say yourself. You don't know how long it will be, but your catalog of possible experiences, a professional hazard, is intense and amazing. And you started grouping music that didn't seem to go together from a very young age. Could you describe a little of the variety of song and artist that might show up in a run and how they would be related to parts of that experience?
- [16:33]
C
Well, this again goes back to the job that I had. I was lucky enough to have this job at the times where I was allowed and encouraged to write about every. Every kind of music except for classical music, because classical music was its own beat. Yeah, it was exclusively for the classical music critics. And so there was a real sense of territory. We couldn't claim that territory, but, you know, so that's like western classical music, but every other kind of music under the sun was something that I could write about. And I really. I really. That really agreed with me because I'm frustrated by the tendency that people have to say, I'm the kind of person who likes this kind of music, and I'm the kind of person who doesn't like that kind of music. People who define themselves by genre, I always think that. No, you. You probably respond and maybe even like, respond to and maybe even like, more than more than you think. You just don't want to think of yourself as somebody who likes classical music or whatever. So I always like moving toward that which I do not yet know or do because I don't know Fully. And I also like the feeling of figuring out the, the sort of underground connections between kinds of music that might seem to be far apart. And so it's all about sort of trying to find, like, what are the connectors between all these different kinds of music.
- [18:14]
B
And, and just to like, interrupt for a second, I like the pure, pure diversity of, of song and artist that comes into this book is really kind of it, it throws you back. And, and, and, you know, listeners should know that one of the most exciting things about this is that you're just going to discover so many new kinds of music if you're open in the way that you suggest. But please continue.
- [18:39]
C
Well, my starting place is often the jazz tradition because I'm really interested in it historically, and I, and I really love it. And I find that, you know, music by people like Thelonious Monk or Cecil Taylor or, you know, Lester Young or whatever is great to run to because these people are improvising. And I, as a runner, want to be improvising. I always, I don't always want to be running on the same path over and over. I tend not to run on tracks. I tried to, I try to make my route different every day. And I really sort of protect and preserve my right to turn wherever I want to turn on impulse. And so I feel like there's that sort of energy that already exists in jazz also. Jazz has, has great, famously has great forward motion and, and the, and the quality that, you know, has been called swing and the, you know, to, to feel that in your, so, you know, you can, you can read about swing. You can read a dictionary definition of it, you can listen to what somebody tells you swing is, but, you know, moving with it physically is a whole other thing. Okay, so jazz is a starting point. But I, I, I also, you know, jazz often has nice tempos, but I didn't want to get stuck into some feeling of, as you say, you know, like, what is the right tempo to run to? I realize that the, the, the, the, the subject of music and running often comes down to this question of what is the ideal tempo to run to, one that suits your pace. And I, and I resist it. I kind of reject it. If all music has motion in it, I want to be able to experience the motion but not to hook it up to my own speed. So sometimes the slowest or most delicate music imaginable can also be great for.
- [21:00]
B
Running, you know, as I, which is so counterintuitive. And so say, say more about that.
- [21:06]
C
Well, the, the sound of somebody playing Very, very, very slowly is the sound of life, is. Is life force. And I want to experience it the slow way as well as the. The fast way.
- [21:23]
B
I. That's a perfect description and a lovely way of thinking about how you begin this process of. Of thinking about the music that will accompany you in an ongoing experience. And that, you know, connects to the way that I think you think about running, which is as pretty distinct from health or well being. You don't accept, on rare occasions, run races. You're not trying to outpace yourself or outpace some sort of ghost of a. A person who is your younger self or somebody else. And that means, in practice, that you trust running implicitly and know that it will just reveal itself to you. In each run through something, it tells you about your body and motion. And you say that you'll run usually between 4 and 12 miles, and you're certain that running will tell you the truth about that experience. This sounds, you know, very much like Zen Buddhism or other kinds of contemplative forms of attention giving to life. And I'd love for you to say a little bit more about that and how that relates to this overall experience.
- [22:34]
C
I'm glad you brought that up. I. I want. I want running to. I. Whatever running can give a person, I. I want it to be revealed. I. I want. I want it to be revealed to me by. By degrees. I want the running to be telling me how I'm feeling. I want the. I want the experience to. To reveal itself without me forcing it in any way. But similarly, and this is, you know, a lot of the book is spent trying to figure out what are the. The. The actual connections between running and listening. Similarly, I want. I approach music in the same way. I want the music to reveal itself to me as much as possible without me putting certain locked expectations on it. A second ago, when I was trying. When I. When we were talking about very slow music, I was trying to remember the name of the. The performer. I was listening to the. The Japanese shakuhachi player who. Who made a record that I. That I loved to listen to while running. His name is Takahashi Kuzan.
- [23:41]
B
This is very funny because I practiced Shakohachi when I was like a junior year abroad in Japan, but gone.
- [23:49]
C
Oh, look at that. All right. Yeah. Yes. So the feeling of surprise that music can afford you and the feeling of experiencing a new. A new thought is very important to me. And I want to be in that position as much as I can. And I also want to be in the position of not. Not Knowing everything. I don't want to have a set list of expectations. I don't. I'm not the kind of person who goes to a concert and says, okay, I know what I want to hear. I want to hear this group play my favorite song the way I like to hear it. And, you know, if they do that, then I'm satisfied. I want basically the opposite of that. I want to be. I want them not to play my favorite song. I want to be surprised or interestingly confused or I want to be left feeling that I don't know everything. And there's still something more to find out. I mean, that kind of relationship to music is what suggests a future. And, you know, it's the future of yourself who. Who has yet to find out more. And I think that this is something I wanted to bring up, actually. The idea of a future, not the future as in the Jetsons, but a. A possible future, is something that the act of running and the act of listening has very much in common. You know, running and listening is always pointed sort of forward through time. It's also. Well, it's actually three time experiences at once. As you listen to a piece of music, you're aware of what you have heard up to this point. You're aware of where you are at the moment, and you're aware that it's leading you somewhere. And running, for me, is much the same. So I like that music is very much about time. And I like the feeling of a kind of extended. I don't want to say an extended present, because then that makes the present be the main thing, but an extended time experience so that you can be essentially in three. Three ways of experiencing time at once.
- [26:16]
B
So you say that music allows people to make connections, but also to see the limits of those connections. And. And. And you also say that it is ultimately a medium of play. So I'm interested in that seemingly, you know, at least some tension or perhaps friction between kind of causing us to. To make connections, but also to see sometimes firm limits. And how that then relates to the notion of music as a medium of play.
- [26:47]
C
Well, music is very interesting because it involves performers and an audience. Implicit in the idea of music is a kind of. Is togetherness or community. It's the community of the music makers and the people who are listening to it. It also involves the idea of, you know, people playing music together. And also, you know, music creates communities. Absolutely does. It creates scenes and some. And, you know, it's. It's. It's. It's a loop. It's an information loop. The, the, the music informs the audience, the audience informs the music, et cetera. So, so community and togetherness is very important, but, and I believe in that and that's very important. But when you're running, you're often alone. And yes, I, you know, this did, this book did come out of the pandemic and there was lots of aloneness in the pandemic and that I found a tension there that I don't think I was really able to totally resolve and I'm not sure that I want to. The tension between, you know, a solitary figure moving through a landscape, not talking to anybody else versus this great show of togetherness that's coming through one's earphones. You know, like, what is, what is your relationship to that? Are you completely apart from it or are you together with it? Does running alone and listening to music through your earphones actually make you, does it separate you from the world or bring you in connection with it?
- [28:30]
B
Because you do have an aside about how much these sort of noise canceling headphones that accompany us everywhere now are very isolating.
- [28:39]
C
Yeah. And I see it especially in my students who tend to walk with headphones on at all times in the city. I don't do that myself, but you know, because the city is a, is a, is a chaotic and sometimes even dangerous place. And I want to be aware of what's behind me and what's, what's around me, you know, from all sides. But I do, but I do often run with music. So, you know, I guess I'm, I'm kind of going against my own ideas there. But anyway, play, Play is involved in togetherness. Negotiation is involved in togetherness. I don't know. I, I think that the idea of play can also occur within oneself when you're trying to figure out where you want to run and what you want to do. And you can sort of amuse yourself by your interaction with the city. You know, things can make you laugh or have a strong reaction or whatever, and you're totally on your own. I mean, I guess that's a form of play too. I like with music. I like the. I, I guess I like imperfections quite a lot. And I like the fact that people, that musicians can make a memorable and valuable sound together, even when they're not perfectly in tune together and when they're not perfect, when their time isn't a hundred percent accurate. I think actually it's the little discrepancies that make them bind together even stronger.
- [30:37]
B
I was just thinking, does that announce it as play when it, when there are the discrepancy. Discrepancies.
- [30:44]
C
I think so. Yeah. I, I, I do think so. There's a, this is, this is a, I don't want to claim authorship over this idea. Lots of people have had it. And to me, it was most beautifully expressed in an essay by the, a musicologist named Charlie Kyle, who wrote about what he called participatory discrepancies in music. Essentially, people, you know, an ensemble playing together, a group playing together, and the, the, the, the, the tiny little instances of musicians being out of tune and out of time with one another. He felt that that's essentially like that's the lifeblood of music. The, the little things that some people might classify as mistakes. But, you know, I feel that's, that's what, that's often what gives music its texture and its meaning. It's very human, people trying to, people trying to coexist and work out things together in real time. I was just thinking about this. We went to see on New Year's Day up in Troy, New York. We went to a concert of the Brandon the Complete Brandenburg Concertos. And.
- [31:56]
B
Oh, wow. Oh, I'm very jealous. Yeah, it was beautiful.
- [31:59]
C
It's good. And it was, and it was brought together by Baroque Music Society that maybe they put on concerts all through the year. But I think the ones that I usually hear about are over the holidays and you know, these, these, these concerts are put on in various places around the area and they're for, they're, you know, like tickets are priced reasonably and reason, you know, and like normal folks show up. This is not like Carnegie hall, but these are excellent musicians. And so, and I think it's like done on a shoestring and very little rehearsal time. And so here we were hearing the, all six Brandenburg Concertos. And it's a big undertaking. Lots of different musicians. And there was, there was quite a lot of out of Tunis and out of time ness. It wasn't perfect. And I felt like I was hearing something very, very real. I felt like this is not the, this is not the sellable Brandenburg Concertos.
- [33:01]
B
Huh.
- [33:01]
C
This is not the, the commercial version. In a way. This is like, this is the real thing.
- [33:09]
B
Oh, I like that. So one of the things about this idea of music as a, as a form of connectivity is thinking about the enigma of otherness. And you imagine as you run through cemetery of Dutch colonialists, that you're also running over the unmarked graves and bodies of black and, and Native Americans. And you think about Ahmaud Aubrey, who was gunned down for being black and running in the wrong place in a white neighborhood. And you say that how we look at others when we're running determines what, what our experience of running will be. So can you connect the, the, the concept of connection in running, but also this problem and enigma of otherness when.
- [33:58]
C
You'Re running, you can have the fantasy that you can really go wherever you want.
- [34:06]
B
You know, it's a, it is funny how that you suddenly feel permission to go everywhere.
- [34:12]
C
That's right. Being, being, being in motion like that. Fly, flying, you know, flying forward, hurling yourself forward. Yeah. It does kind of automatically give you a feeling of permission to, to go places. Truth is, of course, that in every neighborhood you might find different, you know, governing forces at play and you might encounter people who don't want you there. And that's a strange feeling to have. And I wrote that chapter about Ahmaud Arbery just because I wanted to know where, where the place where he was with the place where he loved running, you know, what was it like, what did he see and what happened when he crossed that divide into the protected community where he was killed? And like what, what was that landscape like? What kinds of turns was he making? Was, you know, who, who, who might, who might he have encountered? I mean, from my perspective, you know, I, I, I don't have Ahmaud Arbery's perspective. I'm a middle aged white man and you know, at least within myself, I feel like nobody's really interested in me and I don't seem to be posing any kind of, you know, threat to anybody's authority. That's also partly because of where I'm running and because, and because, you know, I'm making calculated decisions and whatever. But yes, this is another tension that I think I bring up in the book, but, and I'm not able to resolve because I can't, the tension between feeling like, you know, you are flying through the world and in a sense you're invincible. And the fact that, no, actually people are looking at you and people are sizing you up and people might be thinking, what are you doing here? And maybe you're going through a place where you're, where, where for some reason or another you're not allowed. Well, is, I'm just, I'm not going anyplace particular here. But I'm just saying that, you know, running does make you think about the fact that it does make you wonder why, why we can't just go where we want to go.
- [36:37]
B
You Know, and music enters into that kind of question when you begin to sort of shape it as a, as, as a political act that presumes a basic equality between musician and listener. And I wonder if that helps, you know, develop this, this idea for you a little bit.
- [36:58]
C
Well, I guess as there as there are expectations and rules and prejudices in, in society, there are also the, the same kinds of rules and expectations and prejudices in music. You're, you know, you're expected to comport yourself in a certain way. You're expected to play in a certain way according to the, the context in which you're, you know, in which you're playing. And again, I mean, I guess my basic feeling is why not just move against all of those divisions? Why not just try to listen as well as you can, no matter what it is that you're listening to. You don't have to move through life, you know, feeling like you can only listen to certain kinds of music. So, I mean, so you mentioned at the beginning that there's a lot of different kinds of music in this book. It's true. And I actually need to look at the end of the book to, to just give, can I give some examples, you know, just of like far apart kinds of music that are in this book? So there's some punk bands, Nosebleed and Chew. There's this great soul singer, William Devant. There's the pianist Vickinger Olufsen playing Debussy in Rameau. There's Takahashi Kuzan, the Shakuhachi player I mentioned, Alice Coltrane, Sofia Gubaidolina's string quartets. There's Eddie Kendricks, the Motown singer, Theo Parrish, maker of great long DJ mixes, a Detroit techno guy, Bach. Fred Astaire, Elmo Hope, Elian Radig, Ice Spice, Sonny Rollins, dry cleaning. I mean, my, as a, as a, as a music critic, I think basically my, my stealth theme is always breadth. Listen to as much as you can listen. Listen across perceived divisions. Run into the neighborhoods where you're not exactly sure whether or not you are welcomed there. And you know, just, just to do it to, to, to understand a little bit about mo more about what music is. And if your understanding of Bach informs your understanding of Ice Spice, which is possible, then you've really, then that's a lot. And, and you have really figured out something.
- [39:35]
B
You know, I would say yeah, that's, and that's a wonderful way to connect those two. Two ways of thinking about connectivity. I, I always ask my interviewees for book recommendations of things that they're reading and loving recently, and I certainly want to hear those from you. But I'm also thinking that it would be really fun if you could maybe give us some albums that you think about when you're trying to think of a certain kind of experience, even either in running or just listening as a body. And so would you be willing to give us both kinds of recommendations?
- [40:14]
C
Yeah, for sure. For listening. Well, I'll tell you about a record that is really new that I've been listening to while running that I enjoy by pianist, musician named Cara Lise Coverdale. It's called A Series of Actions in a Sphere of Forever.
- [40:31]
B
I love that title.
- [40:32]
C
Yes, she's great, great musician and made a bunch of records just within the last year. And this one is just solo piano. And it sounds depending on your. Your kind of your angle, how you're coming at it and how deep you get into it, it can sound like sort of like ambient or almost still. But then you realize, no, there's actually a lot of direction in this music and a lot of. A lot of intention and a lot of thought and a lot of shaping. So that's just solo piano music. I also love living in New York. I think a lot about the history of jazz in New York, history of Latin music in New York. There's a singer named Ismael Rivera who is a great singer within, you know, like, Afro Latin tradition, what came to be known as salsa. He was in a group called Cortijo issu combo that made great records in the early 60s. So anything with Ismael Rivera singing on it or one of his solo records like Lo Ultimo Enla Avenida, I love. Because his singing is almost uncanny the way it. It's improvisatory, it throws itself forward and it's. His idea of swing was like he completely destabilized the pulse. He could be in many places at once, but his feeling of balance was impeccable. So Ismael Rivera and on his Own and with Cortijo Isukambo. Right. So that's music.
- [42:11]
B
I love those. I can't wait to jump into them. Yeah, but how about. Are there books that you've been loving recently and you'd like to send out to my listeners?
- [42:21]
C
Yeah, this year I read all three books translated so far by Solvai Bala. That amazing.
- [42:31]
B
I love these so much.
- [42:33]
C
Good. Yeah, I do too. The. The they're called on the Calculation of Volume. Parts one, Parts two, Part, Part one, Part two, Part three, have. Have all been translated and published in English. And I think there's going to be seven by the end of them. They're small books, less than, less than 200 pages. And they're, they're, they're time loop stories. It's one time loop story about a woman who is experiencing the same day over and over. I love thinking about time and I love how deeply she gets into the question of what would one do if. If were put in that position.
- [43:11]
B
And they're almost in. Indescribable in a way. I mean, you can, you can give the basic, you know, conceit, but it doesn't get to how, how lived in they feel, which is how I really love why I love them.
- [43:24]
C
Absolutely. And if, and if you have, if you, for instance, if you've seen Groundhog Day or if you've read or watched any number of movies with the same idea that, you know, somebody is trapped in the day, that repeats itself over and over. Those stories usually, usually tends to stick to the, the same ideas. Usually the main character is kind of a jerk and, and part of their learning curve is like making amends for the, for the evil that they have done.
- [43:55]
B
Yeah, it's like the 12 step program for, for Groundhog Day.
- [44:00]
C
Yeah. And this is not like that at all. Salvai Bala finds a completely different set of concerns for this person to, to deal with very, very gradually, day after day. All right, so there's that. And I also just finally read Samuel Delaney's memoir, the Motion of Light and Water, which I'd been hearing about for years. And he. Samuel R. Delaney, you know, famous science fiction writer, and I'm not a big reader of science fiction, so I'm really not very familiar with his science fiction novels. But he. This is a book about his sort of like teen years into his 20s, when he was living downtown in downtown New York and just beginning to publish his science fiction and also having thousands of sexual experiences. And I think that probably when people come to this book, either for one of two reasons, either to, you know, learn about how this great science fiction writer became a science fiction writer, or to experience this like, you know, compendium of sex. But the way he writes about sex is fascinating because all the parts of it that might, you know, that might be classified as all the parts of sex that would seem to be like, you know, racy or, or, you know, bannable or, or whatever, he just kind of glides past that and he's much more interested in connections between human beings who don't know each other yet. And it, the there's so many characters passing through this book, and he's able to describe them really precisely. Also, it's about downtown Manhattan in the early 60s, which is a subject that really fascinates me. I can't get enough of it. And it's very helpful to me, partly because I teach a class at, at Gallatin at nyu, a research seminar about downtown Manhattan music histories. And he really makes you sort of see and feel the streets and the clothes and the weather and the, the dimensions of buildings. And it's very, very up close and beautifully described.
- [46:24]
B
I love those too. They're, they're, as with your eclectic music thinking, these are, are two very different kinds of books, but both equally appealing to me. And I just want to really let my listeners know that they should run out, quite literally and get Run the Song by Ben Ratliff. And I I myself found that I have a really changed perspective on what I listen to when I run and what it might mean for the general experience of our ongoing selves. And I'm so glad I got a chance to talk to you about it. Ben.
- [47:01]
C
Thanks, Chris. It was a pleasure talking about it.
- [47:04]
B
This was great. Well, that's all from me for now. My thanks to Ben Ratniff for coming on to talk about his National Book Award nominated Run the Song. You can find links to purchase Run the Song and all of Ben's recommended books and albums at the website burned by books.com there you'll find all of our previous episodes, links to buy a podcast, T shirt, and ways to get in contact. As you listen, take a moment to rate the show on itunes, Spotify, or wherever you find your podcasts. Until next time, this has been Burned by Books.
- [47:46]
C
Sam.